A Tower Full of Cats

Hidden-object games ask one thing of the player: look harder. The good ones make looking a pleasure. The bad ones turn it into a chore of pixel-hunting and squinting at clutter. A Tower Full of Cats, from developer Devcats, leans toward the first camp, and it gets there by keeping its ambitions tightly drawn.

The premise is a vertical tower that spans the entire history of catkind. The climb opens in ancient Egypt, under the goddess Bastet, then moves through the 1960s, the 1980s and the 2010s before heading somewhere beyond. Each floor is an era-packed room, and the main job is finding the cats hidden in it: a large roster of cats in total, each represented by an outline that a click fills in. On top of that sit secondary collectibles such as nuts and bolts, plus side objectives that unlock tools, including a teleport gun that opens access to new areas.

The game is part of Devcats’ “Full of Cats” series, a line of small, cozy search games built around one joke repeated many times over. This is a refinement of a known formula, and it makes no claim to reinvent the genre.

The audience for this kind of game is specific and loyal. These are players who want a low-stress activity with a clear completion bar, family-friendly humor, and art that rewards close attention. Length is modest. The main path is short, and full completion takes longer without becoming a marathon. The pitch is density, not runtime: a short game with a lot packed into every room.

• A large hidden-cat roster: The primary collectible. Each cat is tracked as an outline that fills in once found, so every room has a visible completion checklist.
• A tower of eras: Rooms stack in chronological order, from ancient Egypt and Bastet through the 1960s, 1980s and 2010s, and on past the present day.
• Secondary collectibles: Nuts, bolts and other extras sit alongside the cats in each room for completionists.
• Tool-gated side objectives: Optional tasks unlock gadgets such as a teleport gun, which opens new areas of the tower.
• Adaptive soundtrack: The score evolves as progress builds, so the music tracks the climb.
• Hand-drawn art and family-friendly humor: Era gags and character work suited to all ages.
• Room-completion achievements: Rewards for clearing everything in a room, aimed squarely at 100% players.

The Search Loop

The loop is as old as the genre. Scan a dense scene, spot a shape that doesn’t belong, click it. What Devcats gets right is the feedback. Representing each cat as an outline that fills in turns an abstract count into a visible ledger. The player always knows how much of a room is done and how much is left. That removes the most common frustration in hidden-object design: the nagging suspicion that one thing is missing from a scene, with no indication of where or what it is.

That ledger matters more at this scale. A roster this large is a lot of searching. Without granular progress tracking, the count would read as a threat rather than a promise. Split across era-themed rooms, the number becomes a series of small, finishable jobs. That is sound loop design for a cozy game: short cycles of attention, frequent closure, and no punishment for stepping away.

What the loop doesn’t offer is escalation. Hidden-object games have a narrow difficulty dial: denser clutter, better camouflage, smaller targets. A game sold on relaxation tells you how far it will turn that dial, which is not far. For the intended audience, that’s the correct call. For players who want their search games to bite, the ceiling is low.

Structure: A Tower of History

The vertical tower is a smart wrapper. It gives a sequence of separate search rooms a physical shape and a direction. Upward reads as progress in a way a level-select menu never does. The chronology does the same work for theme. Ancient Egypt is the obvious starting point for a game about cats, and Bastet is the right patron for the ground floor. Moving from there through the 1960s, the 1980s and the 2010s gives each floor a built-in art brief, with its own palette and its own props to hide cats inside.

The era structure is also where the humor lives. A cat tucked into period-appropriate clutter is a visual punchline, and a new era on every floor supplies fresh setups. The family-friendly tone keeps the jokes broad, which suits a game a parent can hand to a child without a second look.

Side Objectives and Tools

The smartest design decision is the layer above the cat hunt. Nuts, bolts and other secondary collectibles give the eye a second category to look for. Side objectives that unlock tools, a teleport gun among them, add light gating: some parts of the tower stay closed until the player has earned the means to reach them. That turns a flat checklist into a small metroidvania-style loop of acquire, return and access. It’s a modest addition, but it gives completionists a reason to revisit rooms and gives the climb a sense of growing capability.

It’s also where the main friction appears. The core cat hunt explains itself, because the outline does the explaining. Side objectives have no such scaffold. When a game built on calm leaves a player unsure what it wants, the calm breaks. A clearer hint system or objective log for the bonus layer would close that gap.

Length, Pacing and Completion

The main path is short, and full completion takes longer without becoming a marathon. That spread is the design working as intended. The game scales with how much a player cares about the last cat in a room. Achievements for fully completing rooms back this up by rewarding thoroughness room by room, rather than saving the payoff for the very end.

Here, shortness is a feature as much as a limit. Cozy games live or die on whether they outstay their welcome. A search game with a roster this large that ran many more hours would risk sliding from pleasant to tedious, and Devcats ends the climb before that happens. The trade-off is finality. Hidden-object games rarely reward a second climb once every hiding spot is known, and this one is built for a single, thorough pass.

Story

The narrative is thin. The design treats it as a frame for the eras rather than a reason to keep climbing. That’s an acceptable choice for the genre, but it leaves the collection itself as the only motivation. Players who need a narrative hook to finish a game won’t find one here.

Hand-drawn art does the heaviest lifting in a hidden-object game, because the art is the puzzle. Scenes must be dense enough to hide things in, yet readable enough that a found cat feels fair rather than arbitrary. The art is cute and era-specific. The era-per-floor structure also gives Devcats license to shift style and props as the tower rises, which keeps the visual field from going stale across a full climb.

The outline tracker is the key piece of UI, and it’s well chosen: it communicates count and progress without cluttering the scene. The adaptive soundtrack complements it. Because the music evolves as progress builds, it acts as an audio signal of advancement that supports the climb without demanding attention.

On performance, a 2D hand-drawn game of this scope is light on hardware by design. Nothing about the design suggests heavy demands on a modern PC.

The game is sold on Steam as a paid release at $5.99. The interaction model is built for a mouse. Precise pointing at small, partially concealed targets is exactly what a cursor does best, and clicking to fill an outline maps directly onto a mouse button. Mouse play is clearly the intended experience. Players planning to use a controller or a handheld PC should check the store page for input support before buying, since cursor-driven search is a weak fit for analog sticks.

The release is PC-only. That’s a missed fit: a click-and-find game with short, finishable rooms would suit touchscreens well. Room-completion achievements suit a storefront like Steam, where completion hunters already track their progress. For now, this is a PC game.